Solo Technology

After much swapping of parts, it is either the motherboard or CPU. Fortunately, I have a friend who is much more current than I. When he heard about my woes, he offered up an “old” PC of his for parts.

What’s it mean when his old PC is an upgrade for me? Think I’m a bit behind the times in hardware? His case was nicer (whee, my first side window!), so I just moved over my drives, video card, fans and memory over to his motherboard and case. CPU isn’t a dramatic upgrade: from a 2500+ barton core to a 2600+. I did scavenge another 512MB too, so up to 1.5GB.

The only down side was that his didn’t have onboard SATA, so I had to pickup a SATA expansion card. Not the end of the world, but that put the kibosh on my trying to do a windows recovery install. It refused. Ah well, what’s yet another fresh install?

Knoppix was a life saver — the only thing that I didn’t have a fresh backup (or on a non-boot disk) was my QuickBooks data file.

My trusty DSL CD wouldn’t boot on this machine. Tried several times, several options, but no luck. Then I grabbed an Ubuntu disk. It booted and ran (quite well) but mounted all the drives read-only. I wasn’t feeling the urge to research and learn, so I went with Knoppix instead. Booted, showed me the drives and let me pull stuff off the old boot drive to one of the data drives. Definitely burning an extra copy to carry in my tool bag.

Unplanned rebuilds are a real drag.

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